A New Man An Interlude
by SCWLC
Summary: We never do get to see why Riley was saying wow so much


Title: A New Man: Interlude  
  
Author: Sarah Shapiro  
  
Notes and Disclaimer: I don't own 'em, Joss does. Who else would make Buffy and Riley date when he and Kate are so made for each other? Also, this contains spoilers for, the movie, season one, two, three, four, and AtS season one.  
  
Summary: What happened after Walsh asked how many vampires Buffy had killed.  
  
A New Man: Interlude  
  
"So, how many hostiles would you say you've slain?"  
  
The question hung in the air creating a telling silence. The two members of the Initiative waited. Both were certain she had killed more than Riley, the question was exactly how good she was. Finally Buffy spoke.  
  
"Umm . . . well I . . . that is I'm not really sure." She seemed hesitant to state a number.   
  
Walsh went on the offensive. She *knew* this girl couldn't possibly have done as well as her teams of trained professional demon hunters. "You don't know? That seems somewhat careless."  
  
"Well I used to, but then Merrick said that it was a bad idea, that it distracted me during a fight." Buffy looked nervous, and Riley had the sudden urge to shake Walsh and tell her to stop scaring his new girlfriend. Walsh seemed to be considering her next move, and Riley knew how devastating an all out Walsh assault could be. "I guess I'd reached forty or something. I really don't remember. It was a while ago." Riley was taken aback. He'd known she probably had more demons under her belt, but forty? He really was impressed.  
  
"Who is this Merrick?" Walsh demanded. There were other people involved with this 'slayer'? She was probably taking credit for their kills. "What does he do?"  
  
"Merrick was my watcher when I was first called." Buffy paused, taking a deep breath. "He died protecting me from Lothos."   
  
"Lothos?" Riley asked, wondering why she would know the demons by name. It struck him as somewhat inefficient and unprofessional.  
  
"Major vamp leader back in L.A. They crashed the end of year dance at Hemery, and I had to kill him. Pike, he was my boyfriend at the time, got a couple, and I killed Lothos. It was totally freaky," Buffy said, warming to her topic, "He had all this like, hypnosis stuff, and I just totally freaked at first, then I remembered what Merrick said when he died, about 'when the music stops', and I snapped out of it. I killed him with one of the flagpoles in the gym. Pike and I took out like, a gazillion vamps that night, and I had to set the gym on fire to kill them all, which is what got me kicked out of Hemery."  
  
Walsh interrupted "So after Hemery you stopped counting your kills?" Buffy gave her a disgusted look.  
  
"No! I stopped counting like a month in! This was like, three months after." Riley swallowed. She had killed forty hostiles in four weeks?  
  
Walsh was, however, undaunted. "So could you work out an average per night maybe?"  
  
"Sure, I guess," Buffy replied.  
  
"Then multiply that by how long you've been killing. That should give us some idea." Walsh looked at the girl. She was young. She couldn't have been killing that long, Riley had only been doing it for a year, although from what he had said, she was a better fighter than average.   
  
She and Riley glanced at the young woman who was scribbling on a piece of paper. Riley smiled knowing that Buffy had said she was bad at math, but really.   
  
Then she held up her final number of vampires.   
  
2184  
  
Two thousand, one hundred, and eighty-four.   
  
"Of course there's been more, probably," she said, "'Cause you said hostiles, and that's not counting the other demons which are really more of a once a week deal. But I'm not like, totally sure about the vamps, 'cause sometimes I can get like seven in a night, and sometimes there aren't any for a week, and I don't know how many I killed when, like the Master rose and stuff 'cause sometimes it can get like demon party town in Sunnydale."  
  
Riley and Walsh were now just blinking. Her total was greater than the combined forces of the Initiative, and she hadn't been using any sophisticated technology. Walsh gathered herself and said "You mentioned a watcher earlier. How many people are on your team? And, more importantly who has which roles."  
  
"Team? Roles?" Buffy looked at her blankly.  
  
Walsh continued "Riley mentioned you have a backup group, and you can't possibly have accomplished all that on your own."  
  
"Oh, you mean like Giles and Xander and Willow! Okay, let's see. Well Giles is my watcher and he does research and training and stuff. That's what watchers do, then there's Xander and he's my friend, and um well he helps. And Willow does spells, but she's not so good at them yet, and she does research too. Anya's . . . she does stuff, but I'm not really sure what. And Oz. . . well Oz is gone. He left to find himself or something. I don't know, really. Cordelia's in L.A. With Angel so she and Angel don't count any more, but they used to. And Wussley's gone. So, that's . . . four."  
  
Walsh blinked. "So that's five hundred and some for each right?" Certain that Buffy was giving her the numbers for the group combined.  
  
"Nu-uh. Giles has killed like twenty or thirty, and Xand and Will, usually work as a team and they got like twenty or thirty. Angel used to be here and I don't have a single clue how many he got. Probably like four thousand or something. He's good, and he's been doing this for longer than me. I don't take credit for other people's work."  
  
Riley was now simply trying not to have to pick his jaw up off the floor. His new girlfriend had a backup team that had each individually killed more hostiles than he had, and her support group in total had kills in the thousands. He'd been expecting surprises yes, but this was like some kind of hallucination.  
  
Walsh intrepidly continued however, "What is a watcher?" she demanded. "You said this Giles is a watcher, what is that?"  
  
Buffy paused for a moment, thinking, "Well," she paused again before continuing, "Giles is supposed to teach me stuff, and umm. . . Well, I don't know exactly how to explain it." Buffy finally said.  
  
"What kinds of stuff?"  
  
"Well, he taught me how to fight, and I still train with him from time to time, umm, oh! He looks up stuff too." Buffy said.  
  
Walsh broke in. She was determined to prove that this girl wasn't as good at what she did as she seemed to be. "'Look up stuff'? What kind of stuff?"  
  
Buffy rolled her eyes. "Well I was getting to that. See, I don't know all this stuff about how to kill demons and stuff on instinct. I mean I have good instincts for this stuff, but I don't just know. So, Giles has all these funky old books, and the books basically have what the demon is called, what stuff it does, what kind of superpowers they have, and then I go kill it." Buffy grinned, "And then we go for pizza and incomprehensible Indian films with the big orange fish things. Of course Giles also keeps that diary about me that he doesn't let me read 'cause he's being really insulting. I mean he is supposed to write down what I do so that other watchers know what I did when they train their slayers." Buffy sat back and looked at the two of them expectantly.  
  
Riley's mind was whirling. She was treating all of this as some kind of daily walk in the park. She and her friends would go kill something, and have pizza? He and the rest of the Initiative went through rigorous post battle debriefings and she went out for pizza.   
  
Walsh was in shock. There were books on this that provided accurate information? Books that she could have studied instead of doing all of this leg work? Finally, Riley spoke.  
  
"There are other of these watchers? I thought you said that there were only the four of you." Riley looked at her wondering what scary and disturbing thing she was going to say next.  
  
"Well Giles isn't really my watcher anymore 'cause they fired him. You see I used to work for the watcher's council, and then when my boyfriend was hurt and they wouldn't help him I quit." a series of emotions ran across her face as she spoke about him. Anger sadness and something neither Riley or Walsh could quite identify. "They already fired Giles after my eighteenth birthday when there was this test and Giles refused to let me do it by myself, and warned me about it in advance. So they told him he couldn't be my watcher anymore, and they sent this geek, Wussley Wyndham-Pryce. But then Angel was shot with this supernatural poisoned arrow and they wouldn't help us find the cure. So, I quit the council. Bastards."  
  
Walsh was surprised to say the least. "You left what was obviously a very valuable resource for your boyfriend, and because of a test?" At these words Buffy's already somber face darkened into anger.  
  
"They tried to kill me. They sapped my strength, and were planning on leaving me with no strength, reflexes, or anything, locked in a house with a vampire who was a mass murderer when he was a human." Buffy blinked away tears "Kraylich kidnapped my mother and the council did nothing. People who are sworn to protect human life, and they would rather see my mother killed than me miss a test. I hope that clears matters up a bit."   
  
Riley and Walsh stared for a moment. Riley sat there trying to imagine having someone turn on him that way and couldn't. The fact that she and her watcher were close was obvious, and to have something like that occur. He was distressed on her behalf. Walsh looked at this young woman with renewed respect. She had obviously suffered a lot.  
  
"So," Walsh said determined to get the conversation back on track. "Why don't you tell us about how you have achieved some of these kills. I assume from your comments you don't capture vampires?" Walsh asked. "I am particularly interested on how you deal with them when all you use is a wooden stake."  
  
Buffy smiled slightly, "I don't always use a stake, beheading works, and there was that time that we got to use a bazooka. . . "  
  
At that comment Riley broke in curious to know "Where did you get it?"  
  
"We stole it from the army base just outside of town. It was weird. After that time when Xander was turned into a soldier for the day he knew all this stuff about the army, so when there was this demon that couldn't be killed 'by any weapon forged' he came up with the idea of blowing it up. It was cool. He just stood there cause he'd been in a box for like, a gazillion years, and then Drusilla and . . . well these two really badass vampires and they'd brought him back to take over the world, so they were running, since they recognized it, but the Judge just stood there and asked 'What's that do?'. Then I blew him up." Buffy said all this with the same glee that Riley recalled his sister having when giving him a play-by-play of her dates. It was really odd hearing Buffy sound for all the world as though she were talking about a really great time at the movies.  
  
"Oh" was all he could think of to say. He watched as Buffy smiled happily. Then something came to him. "Why do you know their names?"  
  
"What?" asked Buffy looking somewhat puzzled.  
  
Riley clarified. "I notice that you're calling all the hostiles by their names. Why do you do that?"  
  
Buffy blinked for a couple of seconds then asked, "Well, what am I supposed to call them? Number five thousand six hundred and seventy-three?" Riley opened his mouth to ask her a question but she talked right through. "When I say 'The Master' everybody knows who I'm talking about. I'm talking about the thousand year old demon who killed me and gave me nightmares for months." Buffy raised an eyebrow daring Riley to say something.  
  
Walsh however broke in "Killed you? I note that you are sitting here in front of us. What do you mean by killed you? Did he change you into one of the hostiles?"  
  
Buffy shivered and Riley was reminded of how small and fragile she looked and had a sudden urge to gather her into his arms. "It was a couple of days before Spring Fling a couple years ago. My first year in Sunnydale. Giles found a prophecy saying that the Slayer would be led into the mouth of hell by a child, and the Master would rise and then kill her. I was the slayer, and man did I try to find a way out of it. I told Giles I quit, tried to get my mom to take me out of town for that day." Buffy looked so childlike and sorrowful as she spoke, and Riley was suddenly catapulted back to their argument about how he didn't know what her life was like. That was when he realised just how little he knew. "Then these kids at school were killed. It wasn't a run of the mill feeding, and Willow was the one to see it. She was so innocent. Sometimes, I feel so guilty. It's my fault she's not that way anymore." She paused and seemed to shake herself before she continued. "Anyway, then I realised I'm the Slayer. I had to kill him. I had to do this or the world would end. So, I went down there, and we fought. He took some of my blood, and then, when I was too weak to do anything, he dropped me into a pool of water. I drowned." She smiled briefly and looked at Riley. "Xander gave me CPR, and I woke up, but it didn't prevent the next slayer from being called. Anywho, I killed the Master, but I almost didn't succeed. He almost brought hell to Earth. Literally."  
  
Walsh began to ask question after question. What did she mean hell to earth? What other hostiles of the non-vampire type had she killed? What other things had happened? Buffy answered them all. Listing demon after demon, averted Armageddon after averted Armageddon The Anointed One, Drusilla, Acathla, ghosts, Hallowe'en, Lurconis, The Mayor, Faith, werewolves, witches, praying mantises, frat house demons, hyena spirits. The list went on. When they were finished, Riley wasn't even sure that she had told all of her stories. She kept on editing about her ex-boyfriend, and Riley was momentarily fazed. She was right. He knew nothing about her life, and somehow, he wasn't as sure that he wanted to anymore. 


End file.
